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New York City’s Most Ambitious 17-Year-Old

Jack Cahn’s fight for his high school presidency gets the Times’ attention

by
Stephanie Butnick
June 24, 2013
Stuyvesant High School in New York City. (Peter Kramer/Getty Images)
Stuyvesant High School in New York City. (Peter Kramer/Getty Images)

Meet Jack Cahn. The precocious Stuyvesant High School student is a Huffington Post blogger, AIPAC supporter, and entrepreneur (he and his twin brother sell ads on coffee carts). At 17, he’s learning Chinese (he already has English, Hebrew, and Spanish down) and has a LinkedIn profile.

The New York Times’ Mona El-Naggar reports on Cahn’s biggest worry, which isn’t acne or his curfew or the SATs, but democracy:

Mr. Cahn, 17, was elected president this month, but the school’s Board of Elections immediately disqualified him for what it said was a series of violations during the campaign. Mr. Cahn, however, is fighting to overturn the decision.



“Democracy should prevail,” Mr. Cahn said, noting that he won by 118 votes, a 57 percent to 43 percent victory. “Students call me every night, asking me to keep fighting. They’ve compared this to China, Russia, Venezuela.”

The alleged violations include leaving campaign material in the Student Union, putting up more than the accepted amount of posters on a single bulletin board, and putting down a fellow candidate—major no-nos in what is, after all, a high school student government race.

But Cahn isn’t going down without a (very public, perfect college essay) fight. His twin brother David, equally ambitious it seems, has started a Change.org petition, which seeks to “overturn the Board of Elections’ disqualification of Cahn and Moon and restore democracy to Stuyvesant.”

So far, the petition has 356 supporters.

Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.